Alexander Archipenko - SKETCHLINE

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1887 - 1964

Alexander Archipenko

description

A world-famous Ukrainian artist and sculptor, an outstanding representative of Cubism and Abstractionism in sculpture and painting, who worked in France, Germany and the USA.

Works of A. Arkhipenko turned over the established understanding of sculpture, showed the possibility of composing a single of various nonequivalent forms, using glass and wood, metal, fabrics and paper in one composition. The expressive constructivity and at the same time lyricism, extraordinary plasticity in the transmission of movement are the main qualities of the works of the artist and sculptor.

The works of Arkhipenko, highly appreciated by his contemporaries Picasso and Duchamp, Leger and Rodchenko, Delaunay and Gris, enjoyed constant attention, caused positive feedback in the press and monographs. The innovative artist held over one and a half hundred solo exhibitions; he had and has many followers and researchers.

The artist generously shared his extraordinary vision of visual creativity – his private studios in Paris, Berlin, various cities of America, as well as lectures and masterclasses with which he traveled around the cities, were attended by thousands of beginners and venerable sculptors and painters.

He never lost touch with his compatriots – he was a member of the Ukrainian Student Club in Paris, a member of the Ukrainian Community in Berlin; in the USA, he joined the Association of Ukrainian Artists, the Ukrainian Academy of Arts and Sciences, worked at the Ukrainian Institute of the USA. He created four busts of Taras Shevchenko (one is installed in the Park of Nationalities in Cleveland), portraits of I. Franko, Ukrainian public figures. In Soviet Ukraine, the name of Arkhipenko was not mentioned until the thaw of the 1960s; five works from the Lviv Museum were destroyed in the 1950s, as were twenty-two works from German museums in the 1930s.

Key ideas:

– His works of the earliest Parisian period were so original that some students went to Arkhipenko, although he came to France in search of a teacher. Being the first to use cubist techniques in sculpture, he began not to squeeze or sculpt compositions, but to compose them from geometric shapes.

– Most often, images of the master are conventional and abstract. He emphasized, “Since there is a photograph, resemblance is not necessary. I believe that the task of the artist is not to take pictures, but to create”.

– The artist said, “It is the absence of something that is the reason, the impulse of the motive of creation.” From these words, the reformist idea of ​​emptiness was born as an expressive means – the absence of a face in the figure (simulated emptiness) attracts attention to it. The space inside the sculpture was used as a graphic element, equal in strength to the material details – this technique was later developed by Lipschitz and Moore and used by Picasso.

– The name of A. Arkhipenko is associated with the use of counter-volume in sculpture. Instead of curved lines, the master made transitions of concave surfaces limited by a thin contour. This had a special effect since light could slide and flow over concave elements, creating a new harmony of volumes.

– The combination of metal and fabrics, wood and plastic, cement and terracotta, glass and pearls, as well as complete household items, is inherent in the Arkhipenko’s style in collage sculpture. Now, in designs and sculptures, this seems common; however, the Ukrainian innovator was among the first to propose such a synthesis.

– The sculptor invented moving billboards, now familiar to everyone, in 1912, and embodied a complex mechanism that creates picturesque compositions using narrow coloured stripes in the USA, patenting “moving painting”.

Alexander Archipenko

On Artist

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Constructivism

Abstraction

Futurism

Cubism

friends

Amedeo Modigliani

Pablo Picasso

artists

Auguste Rodin

Juan Gris

Fernand Leger

Umberto Boccioni

By Artist

flow

Cubism

friends

Alexander Bogomazov

artists

Vadim Meller

Vladimir Baranov-Rossine

Sonya Delaunay

Alberto Giacometti

Alexander Rodchenko

Pavel Maksimovich Kovzhun

Jacob Lipschitz

Henry Moore

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Mediums: bronze. Location: Campus in Pennsylvania (USA).

1963

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Mediums: bronze. Location: The park of Cleveland (the USA).

1940

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Mediums: plaster. Location: The Center of G. Pompidou, Paris (France).

1916

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Mediums: bronze. Location: The Museum of Modern Art, New York (the USA).

1915

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Mediums: wood, sheet metal, glass, linen. Location: The Museum of Fine Arts, Tel Aviv (Israel).

1914

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Mediums: bronze. Location: The National Museum of Art in Kyiv (Ukraine).

1914

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Mediums: bronze. Location: The Solomon Guggenheim Museum, New York (the USA).

1914

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Mediums: bronze. Location: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (the USA).

1914

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Mediums: plaster. Location: The Guggenheim Museum, New York (the USA).

1913

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Mediums: bronze.. Location: The Denver Museum of Art, Colorado (the USA).

1912